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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. 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 came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a