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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a