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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a