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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a