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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of 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 agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a