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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a