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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a