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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, 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 understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a