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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion 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 resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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 quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a