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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping 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 feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a