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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a