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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a