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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor 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 beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: 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 Vietnam 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a