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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture 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 broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a