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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a