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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor 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 beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a