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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a