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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning 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 effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a