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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a