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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a