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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as 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 driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a