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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The 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 concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a