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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance 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 first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written 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 broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library 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 feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a