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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a