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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV 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 grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a