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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in 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 creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful 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 remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a