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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a