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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a