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All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. 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 short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose 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 visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a