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Every one of the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished 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 got to meet their emerging 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always 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 praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a