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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a