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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers 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 Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a