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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to 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 resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath 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 explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a