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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts 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 cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared 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 risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts 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 shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a