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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. 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 quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared 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 perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a