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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic 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 broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping 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 theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a