Tom Stoppard: An Masterful Dramatist Who Invariably Raised the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached 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 breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a