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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a