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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a