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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness 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 critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a