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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, 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 later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, 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 understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a