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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a