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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand 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 acclaimed 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 prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social 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 addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a