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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly 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 brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting 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 replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a