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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The 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 civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a