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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a