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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of 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 grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough 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 complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a