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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as 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 driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously 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 reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a