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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose 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 breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a