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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering 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 time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a