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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a