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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time 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 peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a