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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a