Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Elevated the Temperature of the Stage

All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a