Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Invariably Heightened the Temperature of the Room

All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re 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 got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting 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 responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a