Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: 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 always 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a