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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up 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 arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a