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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a