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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact 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 Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a