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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

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

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness 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 myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a