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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a