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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a