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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a