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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a