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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a