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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often talked about 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 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 feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a