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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a