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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before 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 answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a