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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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 investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a