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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called 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 operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts 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 shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound 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 increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a