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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember 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 stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a