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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a