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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a