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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to 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 moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a