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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging 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 now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a