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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got 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 critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a