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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came 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 apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 social 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a