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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a