Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech 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 broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a