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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a