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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a