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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a