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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a