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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a