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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a