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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity 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 now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, 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 risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a