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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a