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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough 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 private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a