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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a