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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War 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 think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a