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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers 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 Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a