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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a