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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a