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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much 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 currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a