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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared 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 risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a