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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. 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 short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a