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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. 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 youthful author.

It is telling 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 perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath 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 explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a