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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness 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 consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a