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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me 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 broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with 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 is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a