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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity 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 remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a