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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played 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, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a