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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised 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 victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a