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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a