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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling 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 currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember 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 resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing 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 accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine 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 see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a