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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably 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 civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a