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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, 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 realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a