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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a