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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment 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 restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a