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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting 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 end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a