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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, 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 perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library 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 the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a