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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a