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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a