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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally 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 multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose 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 likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a