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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written 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 perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a