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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a