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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played 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 stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a