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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average 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 watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London 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 feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a