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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of 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 determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a