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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched 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 space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a