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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a