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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a