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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance 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 critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack 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 evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a