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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues 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 perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a