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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “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 daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a