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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a