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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised 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 chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a