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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

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 most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a