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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a