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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks 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 back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, 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 realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – 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 meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack 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 increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a