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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with 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 is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a