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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a