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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness 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 dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a