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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering 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 responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a