Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Always Raised the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a