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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a