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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a