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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a