The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Playwright Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional 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 carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping 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 evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a