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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in 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 got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a