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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings 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 definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a