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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony 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 deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a