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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. 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 dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a