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Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a