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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries 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 underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a