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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously 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 came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a