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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit 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 neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a