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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a