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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result 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 accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a