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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 had the chance to meet their youthful author.

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

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, 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 eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played 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 quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a