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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a