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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, 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 collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a