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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack 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 ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a