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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a