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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with 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 outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a