Stoppard: A Exceptional Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Room

All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a