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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a