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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a