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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 creating 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 the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a