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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a