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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again 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, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a