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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a