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

All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a