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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached 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 ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a