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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 qualms 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 completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a