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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a