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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation 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 thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a