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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays 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 Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity 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 The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a