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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give 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 impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped 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 ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a