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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, 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 risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a