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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely 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 brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a