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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile 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 apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a