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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack 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 holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a