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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes 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 now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly 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 Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a