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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a