Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of 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 nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor 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 beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a