Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: 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 jerk 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a