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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness 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 impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 social 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a