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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing 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 end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a