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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed 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, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: 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 jerk 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a