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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a