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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver 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 youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a