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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of 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 radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. 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 depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a