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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a