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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a