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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor 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 beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a