Stoppard: A Masterful Dramatist Who Consistently Raised the Temperature of the Stage

All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-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 ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a