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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a