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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a