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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach 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 says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a