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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack 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 increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a