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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

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 the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating 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 present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a