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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably 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 praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a