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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a