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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. 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 language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – 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 myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a