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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a