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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal 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 iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up 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 turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a