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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a