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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity 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 first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a