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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 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 prey of chance circumstances leading to 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or 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 totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a