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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a