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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much 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 was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a