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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a