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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting 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 replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a