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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions 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 intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a