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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – 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 Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse 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 portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a