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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in 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 young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a