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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes 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 now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a