The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Elevated the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given 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 watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance 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 dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a