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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent 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 principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a