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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a