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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a