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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a