The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Stage

All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a