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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings 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 word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up 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 more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a