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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile 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 more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a