Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a