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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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 silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a