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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a