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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give 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 broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former 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 theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath 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 explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a