Stoppard: An Brilliant Dramatist Who Always Elevated the Temperature of the Room

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a