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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic 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 emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced 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 scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a