The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a