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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a