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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a