The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Invariably Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed 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 victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers 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 gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a