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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting 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 demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a