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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a