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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling 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 currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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 studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a