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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose 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 key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a