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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a