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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose 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 turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a