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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, 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 perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a