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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a