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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor 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 stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions 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 predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a