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

Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met 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 premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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 carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a