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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath 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 addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a