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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a