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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching 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 apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a