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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library 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 the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a