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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. 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 been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared 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 broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile 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 apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a