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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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 stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils 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.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a