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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a