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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called 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 reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to 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 responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a