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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a