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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a