The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Invariably Raised the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a