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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a