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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of 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 obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually 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 repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a