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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating 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 Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a