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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host 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 beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a