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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to 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 driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a