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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social 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 completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a