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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night 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 former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a