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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a