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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library 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 feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a