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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance 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 opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, 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 collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a