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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a