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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise 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 commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a