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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in 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 got to meet 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 premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey 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, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a