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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a