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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity 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 sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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 studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a