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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand 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. 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 arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a