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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a