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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance 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 sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly 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 money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a