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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a