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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral 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 personality and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a