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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy 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 prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken 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.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a