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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes 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 currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a