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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a