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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a