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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called 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 driver 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 youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching 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 more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly 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 Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a