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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss 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, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a