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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant 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, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a