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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture 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 pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The 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 result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a