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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired 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 watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching 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 arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a