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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a