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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as 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 contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a