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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a