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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the 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 sarcasm and inflexibility with a