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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up 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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a