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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a