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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises 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 independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a