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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic 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 emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a