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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside 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 deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly 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 presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a