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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a