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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

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

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a