The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a