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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of 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 nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, 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 perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 Vietnam 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 addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a