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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a