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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got 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 dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. 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 silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus 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 broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a