Stoppard: An Brilliant Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a