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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing 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 word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a