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

Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a