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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a