Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably 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 result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. 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 incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a