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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, 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 perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a