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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came 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 apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a