The Playwright Tom Stoppard: An Exceptional Playwright Who Consistently Heightened the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a