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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from 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 at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a