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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a