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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a