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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a