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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw 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 astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a