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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing 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 got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a