Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Temperature of the Theatre

All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a