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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much 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 today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense 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 myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a