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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a