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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – 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, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a