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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched 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 space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 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 think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a