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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging 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 The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, 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 eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a