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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a