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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating 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 resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a