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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands 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 personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a