Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came 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 increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a