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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young 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 The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in 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 dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared 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 risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a