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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a