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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful 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 stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a