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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a