Stoppard: An Exceptional Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a