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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran 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 creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit 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 one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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 carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a