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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up 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 fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a