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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember 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 beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome 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 relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a