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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a