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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, 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 astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a