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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a