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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech 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 broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization 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, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a