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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. 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 stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a