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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping 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 more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a