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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a