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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a