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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “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 touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a