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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a