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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a