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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a