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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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 carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a