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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose 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 apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a