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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor 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 resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a