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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. 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 silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack 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 breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a