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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended 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 victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a