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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly 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 mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a