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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a