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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a