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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a