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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, 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 unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a