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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness 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 was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a