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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to 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 silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a