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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a