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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met 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 sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a