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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose 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 increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely 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 the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a