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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written 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 former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a