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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a