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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a