Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 eventually met 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 sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always 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 creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination 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 significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a