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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound 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 ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a