The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Temperature of the Stage

All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance 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 conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a