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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a