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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a