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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely 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 Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a