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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written 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 failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important 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, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a