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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough 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 investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came 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 increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a