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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former 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 complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a