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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, 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 evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a