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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a