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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “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 significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a