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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand 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 commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a