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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity 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 resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a