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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a