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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a