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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture 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 pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a