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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television 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 overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London 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 years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a