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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young 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 currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a