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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a