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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a