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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a 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 Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a