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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity 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 currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy 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 indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a