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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently 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 brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a