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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a