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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated 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 in time 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying 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 explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a