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

All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early 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, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand 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 praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, 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 significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a