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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a