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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a