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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a