The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Always Heightened the Temperature of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a