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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a