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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time 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 brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember 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 beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw 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 space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a