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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a