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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in 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 creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a