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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a