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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a