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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling 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 Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a