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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a