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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a