Tom Stoppard: A brilliant playwright who always raises the temperature in the room | Tom Stoppard

AThe best dramatists will push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it their way. Tom Stoppard’s achievement was to take seemingly esoteric topics—from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness—and turn them into witty, inventive, and often moving dramas. Theatre, as Laurence Olivier once said, is a great dazzler of thought. Stoppard confirmed this with his ability to make ideas dance.

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. This is entirely thanks to Philip French, who was also a BBC producer, as well as a film critic. In 1966, I was asked to give a short lecture on two radio plays by a then-unknown writer (one described him to me as “a dissolute journalist from Bristol”) called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Bott’s Breakup, a poor clerk pays an ever-escalating taxi fare. In If I’m Happy, I’ll Be Honest, the bus driver tried to call his wife, who was on call around the clock. I was blown away by the brilliance of both plays and was able to meet their young author.

It says a lot about Stoppard’s great spirit that even after I appeared on television in 1968 and gave a dandy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as a former journalist, he understood the ways of our world.

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven as much by ideas as by character and plot. But just as we belatedly realize that Pinter has always been a political dramatist, we eventually realize that there is an emotional undercurrent to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead have been praised for their cleverness in creating drama from Hamlet’s two marginal characters, but repeated viewings suggest that it’s more about us all being victims of arbitrary circumstances that led to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became a famous Stoppard actor, saying to me: “In Tom’s plays, the word is everything. The word overcomes silence, overcomes darkness… I think that is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit Jumpers. After all, this was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality is a conditional response to history, or whether moral sanctions are subject to an absolute, God-given law. It is not your ordinary theatrical topic, but here is the topic of a lecture prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realized it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society as astronauts navigated the moon and a former agriculture minister was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury.

Stoppard’s achievement—one he shared with Michael Frayn—was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work has also been thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before meeting Jumpers, I met him on the steps of a London library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is this?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

As time passed, the emotional content of his plays became ever clearer. Arguably the breakthrough came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands better than any of his plays for revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public obligation is the result of private confusion and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a growing awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotions coincide perfectly in a scene in which a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations, to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries that have been overlooked and lost to display will have their time again.” And this is exactly what happens, as Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe continues beyond her tragically truncated lifetime.

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright has rarely been in doubt. What was controversial, especially in the early years, was his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel on my tiptoes,” he said in 1976, “because when I started writing, you felt bad if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no regrets about it. Indirectly avoid the slapstick.” [his 1974 play]“The importance of being serious is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that because Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morality, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his argument by writing a number of works that largely addressed human rights violations by authoritarian regimes. One of the most surprising performances was Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, which premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane being locked in a cell with a real lunatic believed to be in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage, and to see Stoppard expose the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As she wrote at the time, “iron and toughness are met with witty and comforting defiance.” Robert Cushman put it best when he later wrote in the Observer that “Mr. Stoppard’s cheerfulness is a moral quality in itself.”

But the idea of ​​Stoppard as a detached, apolitical observer of life has been decisively punctured by many of the works that have followed. Professional Mistake, shown on BBC2 in 1977, was a beautifully crafted work that showed a Cambridge ethics professor, played by Peter Barkworth, facing the real world of persecution during his visit to Prague and realizing that there is such a thing as an instinctive morality based on right and wrong. It was one of many plays that showed Stoppard dealing directly with political issues, acknowledging his national origins (he joked that he was just a “Czech renegade”), which he concealed in accordance with his mother’s wishes when she was alive, and the fact that he was Jewish.

Later, political works varied in quality. The Coast of Utopia (2002) was a hugely ambitious trilogy about revolution that became livelier when dealing with characters that Stoppard had intellectually disavowed: especially the rootless anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin. Rock and Roll (2006) was a tighter and better play, suggesting that while the Czechs fought hard for their freedoms, we were gradually allowing ours to slip away from our grasp. Stoppard’s last play, Leopoldstadt (2020), was a deeply personal work that dealt, very poignantly, with the history of a Jewish family in Vienna, which ended with one of its members revealing that he had grown up as an assimilated English boy but had acknowledged his true identity.

This was Stoppard’s final act to expose himself. Born in Czechoslovakia, he was evacuated to Singapore and India during World War II and finally settled in England in 1946, willingly adopting the country’s customs. He loved everything about it, from its countryside and its cricket to its supposed liberal tolerance. If circumstances forced him to acknowledge his national and racial heritage, it was of great benefit to his later works and he found great fulfillment in Leopoldstadt.

So where does Stoppard stand in the hierarchy of modern British drama? Harold Pinter made poetry out of demotic speech and revealed the subjectivity of memory. Alan Ayckbourn explored the traumas of middle-class life and exploited the theatrical possibilities of time and place. Tom Stoppard demonstrated that scientific, moral, and philosophical ideas can be a source of drama as long as there is a core of real emotion. But while he was a playwright who always raised the temperature in the room, it is no less important to say that he was a kind, decent, thoughtful human being. My last glimpse of him was before the curtain rose on the second night of the rock and roll revival at the Hampstead Theatre. Stoppard was on his way home, but before he did so, he stopped to have a friendly chat with the receptionists and to affectionately pet a dog that belonged to one of them. After bidding him a warm farewell, he quietly left into the night.