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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit 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 was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a