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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated 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 understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a