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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a