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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 qualms 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 totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a