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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a