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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet 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 now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a