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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a