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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described 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 operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. 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 pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, 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 former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a