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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack 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 increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a