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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways 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 narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared 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 dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a