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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much 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 now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually 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 brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a