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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue 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 typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a