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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called 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 reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor 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 beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a