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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to 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 present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a