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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 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 prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous 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 thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a