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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a