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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. 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 resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up 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 evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: 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 the Vietnam War 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 addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a