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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young 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 now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 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 think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a