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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping 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 sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a