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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes 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 today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling 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 achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a