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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London 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 years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a