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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a