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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to 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 touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides 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 number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a