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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up 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 visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a