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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a