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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with 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 result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a