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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a