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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic 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 emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared 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 collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying 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 addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a