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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

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 philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a