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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a