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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – 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, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile 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 visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a