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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, 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 recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a