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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a