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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive 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 characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a