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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a