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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing 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 gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a