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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a