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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in 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 ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, 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 perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a