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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a