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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a