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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research 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 carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a