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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present 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 accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a