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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 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 prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a