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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. 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 beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a