Stoppard: A Exceptional Playwright Who Always Heightened the Temperature of the Theatre

Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised 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 victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a