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All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive 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 clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a