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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant 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, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a