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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed 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 pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a