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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a