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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind 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 explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a