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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a