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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a