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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social 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 avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a