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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in 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 eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso 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 narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a