Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Always Raised the Temperature of the Stage

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a