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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a