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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination 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 ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a