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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a