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

All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a