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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound 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 more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a