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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity 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 premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “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 touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a