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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a