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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a