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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before 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 years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a