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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting 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 increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a