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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly 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 replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a