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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a