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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. 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 celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a