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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical 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 one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, 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 acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a