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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of 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 at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful 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 was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a