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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced 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 brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social 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 totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a