The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Masterful Playwright Who Consistently Elevated the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed 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 realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a