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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a