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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral 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 personality and storyline. But, just as we later 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching 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 ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact 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 depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a