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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor 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 acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a