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Every one of the great playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a