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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a