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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a