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All the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a