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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity 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 remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture 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 broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands 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 individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a