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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. 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 national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a