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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a