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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared 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 pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a