The Playwright Tom Stoppard: A Brilliant Playwright Who Always Heightened the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, 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 indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a