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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk 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 fractured 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.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a