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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing 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 causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached 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 Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a