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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened 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 multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a