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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise 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. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing 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 causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a