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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. 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 bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a