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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced 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 fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a