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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known 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 reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent 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 watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a