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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran 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 youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister 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 complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a