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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a