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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling 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 Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library 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 the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a