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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly 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 the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a