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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound 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 apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind 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 deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a