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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. 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 depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a