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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the risks 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 Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a