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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised 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 casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a