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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a