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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack 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 increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a