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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness 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 arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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 investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a