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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember 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 beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a