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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a