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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a