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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember 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 beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a