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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack 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 more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a