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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in 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 beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts 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 had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a