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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally 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 peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose 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 visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a