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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with 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 says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. 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 reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a