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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a