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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured 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 archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying 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 determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a