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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace 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 was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London 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 the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a