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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a