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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts 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. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a