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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a