Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a