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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping 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 feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 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 avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a