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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a